Sharla in Japan, a Canadian student finishing University in Japan, visited several cat cafes in Japan and created a cute and informative video tour. She visits Kyariko Cat Cafe, which sells drinks for visitors and snacks for its purebred cat inhabitants, and Ekoneko Cat Cafe, which takes in stray cats, nurses them back to health, and allows visitors to permanently adopt the cats.

Tokyo-Style Cat Cafes May Be Coming to L.A.If you’re like nearly everybody in their mid-20s, you’d love to have a pet but you know that you lack both the time and, let’s be honest, the responsibility to keep one alive for more than a week. Luckily there is a new type of cafe popping up around the western world that could cure this very predicament. Originating in Japan, cat cafes are like every other cafe, except that they are swarming with cats that you can pet as you sip your morning java. These cafes have already shown in up in Canada, Europe, and Australia, and are soon to open up in San Francisco and Oakland as well. But non-allergic Los Angelenos need not feel left out, because with enough Kickstarter dollars, Carlos Wong is planning to open the first cat cafe in the City of Angels.

Wong first fell in love with the multi-species cafe concept after spending a year in Tokyo. It was there that this business model started with cat and dog cafes, but it soon branched out into owl, goat, rabbit, and (not kidding) penguin cafes as well. Trying to start non-exotic, Wong’s proposed cafe will be only cats and will be called – what else – Catfe.

After his immersion in the dense, fast-paced environment of inner Tokyo, Wong returned home to Los Angeles and thought that Downtown L.A. has a pretty similar vibe to it. After what had to be an uncomfortable conversation with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, officials said the concept would be workable, provided the food was prepared in a separate, non-cat covered building. In order to jump this particular real estate issue, Wong is thinking he may have the food prep area separated from the feline quarters by a wall of plexiglass. You’d get your food on the HUMANS ONLY side and then bring it over to the interspecies region to eat.

Wong’s Kickstarter goal is high, $350,000 high, to be exact. But Wong explained that this specific business requires a substantial financial cushion to begin with. “If it’s just a café and you’re not making enough money, you can just jury-rig something to try to make it work. But these are live animals. I don’t want to be in that position.”

A beautiful cat named Gaiyek sits down to an elegant sashimi dinner that had been painstakingly prepared for her by her humans Adeline and Kenneth.

A video that k and I made, based off this one crazy thought that our cat should eat sashimi and enjoy it as much as we do. Cats can’t eat raw fish, so we constructed everything out of ‘fish-type’ cat snacks that we found in our local pet storehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u021Izd8cw

Cat Town Cafe, The First Operational Cat Cafe in the United States Opens in Oakland, California

Cat Town Cafe in Oakland, California opened this past weekend and became the first operational cat cafe in the United States. Founders Ann Dunn of Cat Town Adoptions and Adam Myatt have made it their mission to socialize adoptable cats with humans in the comfortable, relaxed environment of the café. Appointments are available on an hourly basis and can be booked online.

Guarantee your visit to America’s first Cat Cafe & Adoption Center. For a $10 (non-refundable) donation, you can schedule your hour-long visit in our Cat Zone for socialization time with our adoptable cats. Otherwise, we welcome walk-ins at no charge, but can’t guarantee immediate entry, depending on Cat Zone capacity.